South Africa

Beer cop

ANYWHERE else, his appointment might have been good for a laugh. Not in South Africa. The news that the government was appointing Meyer Kahn, a beer baron, to head the national police force was greeted with sober enthusiasm. For the first time since apartheid ended, something bold is being done to combat crime.

Mr Kahn is better known as chairman of South African Breweries, a company he has built into one of the world's top ten brewers. Big, burly and blunt, Mr Kahn is not a man to be messed about with. He expresses himself with vigour.

South African managers have learnt how to deal with the ten plagues. Revolution, labour unrest, sanctions, drought: we've been through it all and it's just like another day in the office. When I hear London businessmen complaining about their problems, I feel like vomiting.

Mr Kahn will need a steady stomach in his new job. South Africans, black and white, have lost faith in the police.

Crime experts debate whether the murder rate—61 per 100,000 last year—is the world's highest. In any event, it is about seven times that of the United States. It amounted to 71 people being murdered every day in 1996. And in Gauteng, the province centred on Johannesburg, the murder rate is nearly a third higher than in the country as a whole. Car hijacking, rape and armed robbery are rife. Among the many, this correspondent and her husband were the other day held up for over two hours in their home by armed gunmen.

Lawlessness has unleashed public anger. Last week, banks closed for two hours as their employees marched in protest at the number of armed bank robberies; so far this year there have been 184, in which 14 people have been killed. A local newspaper recently created a “wall of remembrance” at one of Johannesburg's main crossroads. Within days, it was covered in hand-painted portraits of murdered people. Counselling services are overwhelmed. The Trauma Clinic, a non-profit body which treats survivors of violent crime, sees up to 120 patients a month, black and white, 20% more than a year ago.

Complaints about crime used to be seen by the government as the whingeing of once-cosseted whites. After all, blacks in the townships have long lived with criminal violence; it is a newer experience in white suburbs. But now, it seems, the government is prepared to take the issue seriously. If nothing else, crime is damaging South Africa's reputation. Last week, a survey by the World Economic Forum ranked South Africa alongside Colombia and Russia as countries in the grip of organised crime. Prompted by such indignities, President Nelson Mandela brought in Mr Kahn.

How much good will he be able to do? In many ways, it is a clever appointment. Whites approve because Mr Kahn, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, is a respected and successful businessman who tolerates no nonsense. Blacks like it because Mr Kahn's company employs lots of black managers, brews popular beer and sponsors the country's soccer league, a black passion. Moreover, Mr Kahn is wonderfully unlike South Africa's patrician, sometimes arrogant, white mine-owners.

Critics would have preferred William Bratton, a former New York police chief, whose offer of help was declined. Mr Kahn will have no say over strictly policing matters: responsibility for catching criminals, investigating crimes and so on stays with George Fivaz, the police commissioner. Mr Kahn's job as chief executive, which starts in August, is to manage the police force.

And the police force, as a report by McKinsey, a consultancy, has found, is a case-study in poor management. At one police station, McKinsey found that four-fifths of the police cars were unavailable for policing. At another, only one in ten policemen was out on the beat; the rest were busy filling in forms and doing administrative work. At yet another, a quarter of policemen were “off sick” at any one time.

Not least of the obstacles facing Mr Kahn is that much of the crime is organised. There are opportunist criminals, tempted by white riches and undeterred by any sense of social cohesion. But the end of apartheid opened up a once-closed authoritarian state, enabling hundreds of criminal syndicates to move in, from places as far flung as China, Colombia and Nigeria. This organised crime has roped in corrupt policemen. Only last week, the government admitted that, of the 1,800 members of the police VIP-protection service, no fewer than 198 were facing criminal charges, 22 of which were for murder.